I think that the commonly used refactoring functions would make a big difference and right now most IDEs are pretty bad at them (especially across all the languages jetbrains supports):
- rename variable/function
- extract variable/function
- find duplicate code
- add/remove/extract function parameter
- inline a function
- moving code between classes
- auto imports
Others are used more rarely and can probably be left out but I do think it would save a lot of tokens, errors and time.
You’re missing the point, it’s about those tools drastically improving context window management. When you want to tackle large refactors, Claude Code will blow tens of thousands of tokens just searching for files and various refactor related file manipulation. When you run out of window in the middle of a big refactor you’re going to have a bad time.
This is 5% of what refactoring is, the rest is big scale re-architecting code where these tools are useless.
The agents can do this big scale architecturing if you describe exactly what you want.
IntelliJ has no moat here, because they can do well 5% of what refactoring is.